David Bromberg Parses Britney, Parker, $200,000 Fiddle

By Jeffrey Burke -
Aug 27, 2012

A new documentary on David Bromberg
opens with the musician shown as an animated line drawing being
told to move along by a policeman. Then he morphs into the
flesh-and-blood fellow walking in Wilmington, Delaware.

Bromberg, 66, a gifted guitarist with a roots-music archive
at his fingertips, has undergone several transformations since
his youth in Tarrytown, New York.

The biggest came when he quit regular performing in 1980,
slipping below the public radar while he remained a warm memory
for fans and musical partners. He became a collector of U.S.-
made violins and a trader in top fiddles of all types.

In 2002 he set up a violin shop in Wilmington and began
playing in weekly jam sessions as part of the city’s urban-
renewal efforts. A few years later he returned to the recording
studio and performing. He’ll be at Manhattan’s City Winery with
his Big Band this week.

It was during this latest phase that Bromberg impressed
Beth Toni Kruvant, producer and director of the documentary,
“David Bromberg: Unsung Treasure.” It opens the Woodstock Film
Festival in upstate New York in October.

“I saw David perform and he was fabulous. I wondered where
he had been all these years,” wrote Kruvant by e-mail from
Israel, where she is working on a new project about African
refugees in that country.

‘Burnt Out’

In a conversation at Bloomberg world headquarters in New
York last week, Bromberg said he quit performing 32 years ago
because “I was burnt out.” He studied luthiery and “played
three violins I made in three successive years at Carnegie
Hall.”

He quickly warmed as collector and vendor to the subject of
violins.

“People talk about the secret of Stradivari,” Bromberg
said. “He had a secret. He knew what to do with the wood. That
was it. All this nonsense you hear about his varnish is truly
nonsense.” He explained that everyone had the same materials to
work with under Italy’s guild system.

Bromberg has amassed the largest collection of vintage
American-made violins in the world. They aren’t for sale. The
most expensive violin in the Wilmington shop at the moment is a
$200,000 instrument by “a great Milanese maker named Paolo
Antonio Testori, and it’s arguably one of the very best he ever
made.”

At one point he takes note of where he is, cautions against
the idea of buying a fine fiddle as an investment and segues to
a story:

No Sale

“When I opened my shop, among the first visitors were a
couple of commodities traders. I showed them my vault, which I
was very proud of, my walk-in vault. One of them said, ‘OK,
which of these would be the best investment, because maybe I’ll
buy one for investment.’ And I said, ‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t
sell it to you.’”

His musical tastes remain as eclectic as when his concert
sets bounced from folk to blues, jazz to bluegrass. He singled
out a Brooklyn group called Balkan Beat Box, the Abyssinian
Baptist Choir and a 1960s septet of Bronx housewives known as
the Pennywhistlers. He’s listening to a lot of Eastern European
vocal music.

The talk jumped around from the ossification of classical
music to the rebirth of bluegrass, from Nicolo Amati to Jack White, Charlie Parker to Britney Spears -- yes, the “Oops”
girl.

“People will use Britney Spears as a curse, as an example
of something terrible,” Bromberg said. “Well, it’s not what I
like, but I know enough about how music works and how the music
business works to know that she must be doing something right.
She appeals to a certain audience to whom her music will be like
the Beatles are to my generation.”

Someone cries “Plastic!”

Joplin Rag

“This is a different time,” Bromberg said. “My
generation didn’t have computers. The current generation doesn’t
know life without them. So you say it’s plastic, but to them
it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

A few moments later, Bromberg did what to him is the most
natural thing in the world, pulled his Martin acoustic from its
gig bag and played his own clearly unossified arrangement of
Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”